Why I’m a Cover Girl.

Posted on January 15, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

Listening to R2’s ‘Sounds of the 60s” this morning, I realised to my shame that I had no memory of ever before hearing the original Beach Boys’ version of “Break Away.”

Why? Because in the mid 80s I discovered the beautiful (British) jazz-tinged Harvey and the Wallbangers acapella version and had played it hundreds of times. The cover was magnificent, because it heightened the greatest beauty of all Brian Wilson originals — the sweet harmonies. Like the Zombies, featured below, they were classically trained to value interpretation.  I’ve been musing on why I love cover versions for The Spectator and why they deserve more respect. Did anyone slag off Shakespeare for “covering” Hamlet or “sampling” Holinshed? Do make sure you scroll all the way down to view/hear all the clips, especially Strawberry Switchblade. Feel free to add your own suggestions…

I’ve probably seen between six and 12 versions of every great Shakespeare play. Cover versions are what highbrow theatre and live classical music are all about. But in pop music, with the rise of the singer-songwriter, the respect accorded to the Brill Building of professional songwriters declined through to sneering at the Monkees, the mockery accorded to Stock Aitken Waterman’s Hit Factory and the horrors of the X Factor theme shows.

Interpretation is all. If I had to come up with my desert island discs, they would probably be mostly covers. (Though not Kylie Minogue’s SAW-produced ‘Locomotion’.) Here, rather than the most famous cover versions (e.g. ‘Twist and Shout’ by the Beatles), I’ve offered up a selection of less obvious examples worthy of further study.

Top of the World – Shonen Knife

The greatest cover version of all time in my mind, and recorded for a Carpenters cover album. It’s an interpretation that dared to be greater than the original, but could not have existed without it. ‘Top of the World’ was the Carpenters at their worst – sickly, rather than rich, with a Eurovision-level tune. Shonen Knife found the punk anthem hiding within – and there’s that delighftul Japanese pronunciation of the chorus, too. If only Karen had lived long enough to do a Tom Jones and perform it with them in a post-ironic way.

From Russia with Love – Natacha Altas

This 1997 cover off the ‘Shaken & Stirred: The David Arnold James Bond Project’ album, has all the ingredients the original title track by Matt Monro lacked: genuine Asia Minor mystery, fiddly little Arabic flourishes in the vocals, and those excellent electronic sonar pings underpinning the whole rhythm. I actually would like them to have a go at overlaying this onto Robert Brownjohn’s iconic dancing woman opening credits.

‘Spanish Harlem’ – a Romeo and Juliet / Westside Story kind of story romance – was written in the Brill Building by a young Phil Spector and Jerry Leiber in 1960 for Ben E. King just as he left the Drifters.

Spanish Harlem – Ben E. King

Technically this is not a cover version, I suppose, but there’s no question the song was to be re-recorded by a range of artists. With his magnificent voice, King’s version is sweetly unpretentious and oozing with Spanish guitars, marimba and drumbeats. It’s a song from an era when songs lived a life of their own, but blossomed under the stewardship of a careful interpretation. It also made New York districts seem sexy and mysterious in a way Britain never managed. (Not even in Pulp’s ‘Sheffield: Sex City’.) I used this song to teach my kids about metaphors and similes.

Spanish Harlem – Aretha Franklin

A bigger hit, Aretha Franklin’s 1971 version is feminism incarnate. I imagine her in a suede tassled tunic top, sashaying down the streets.

Spanish Harlem – The Mamas & the Papas

Apparently, the lyrics to ‘Spanish Harlem’ can be traced back to a medieval Czech folksong. It translates perfectly to southern California in 1966.

I Call Your Name – The Mamas & the Papas

Like The Mamas and the Papas’ sublime ‘Twist and Shout’, Mama Cass’s blowsy vocals and that honkytonk tone give their cover the feel of it being sung in a bordello. It works because it is nothing like Lennon’s brilliant rock-y version.

Summertime – The Zombies

A song from the Gershwin show about the seething passions of black Americans in the steamy southern US, performed by five middle class white boys from St Albans. Why does this work? Because it’s transformed with love and intelligence into a bluesy ‘60s swing version, and because of Colin Blunstone’s breathy vocals. Proof of the value of a cathedral choir and grammar school education.

Summertime – Sarah Vaughan

The climbing violins; that rich voice: total class. I discovered this at the same time I discovered Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. As Tracie Turnblad said to Link Larkin in the original Hairspray, ‘I wish – I wish we were dark-skinned.’  British Ad men used it to sell Pimms in the 1980s.

Summertime – Fun Boy 3

Three boys who understood in 1982 that the power of ‘Summertime’ was having the guts to make it your own. This is ‘80s, frosted, spike-coiffed, ska-tinged perfection.

Sorrow – David Bowie

This was previously recorded by The Merseys (formerly The Merseybeats), a generic Beatles copycat band of their era. But, on Pinups, his album of covers Bowie changed it into a sophisticated piece, restructured with strings and guitars. It’s like a John Donne poem about a love affair dominated by jealousy and emotional cruelty. I used to play it to my daughter when she went through a phase in which she was fixated on Alice in Wonderland, as it’s about a girl with ‘long blonde hair’. A very bad girl.

House of the Rising Sun – Nina Simone

Once you’ve heard Nina Simone’s angry rolling waves of piano, the Animals’ version sounds quite quaint. This makes me think of the film of Walk on the Wild Side (Laurence Harvey, Capucine & Jane Fonda in a New Orleans brothel). It’s also excellent to run to on a treadmill.

Since Yesterday – Strawberry Switchblade

This is a 1985 cover of Sibelius’ 5th symphony (specifically the Swan-call motif). According to a Radio 4 documentary, it’s one of the most popularly sampled pieces of classical music in the pop repertoire. (Sinitta and Leonard Bernstein in ‘On the Town’ are among the other cover artists.) Strawberry Switchblade remained big in Japan, but were one-hit wonders in Britain despite – or because of – their Scottish punk root background. With their ludicrous name and outfits, they epitomise the greatest glories of ‘80s pop for girls of my Smash Hits generation.

Til There Was You – The Beatles

This tune from The Music Man, found on their second album, With the Beatles, is the only Broadway song the Beatles ever recorded. This video recording enables you to see Paul McCartney doing his finest ever Dirk McQuickly impression at the Prince of Wales theatre on Nov 4th 1963. Cynics might see the seeds of the worst McCartney sentimentality sown within – but ‘World without Love’ was to come next, written for Jane Asher’s brother in Peter and Gordon. And ‘I Will’ (from ‘The White Album’) is a lovely companion to Lennon’s ‘Julia’. However, ‘The Frog Chorus’ lay beyond.

And one cover disaster…

David Bowie – God Only Knows


Mess with a perfect song at your peril. Orchestrated on a grandiose scale with those inappropriate super deep vocals, this oddity on Bowie’s 1984 Tonight album is completely misjudged, adding pretentiousness where Brian Wilson’s original gave us high-pitched, sweet grandeur..

Which brings us back to where I started this morning, with the Beach Boys’ Break Away. I recommend you check out one of the undervalued glories of 80s Britain: Our own Harvey and the Wallbangers.

You can read the original post on the Spectator Arts Blog here.


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Swinging racism: Floella Benjamin’s memoir of 60s London

Posted on January 13, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

Talking to Linda Grant earlier this week (see next post below) about her 60s/70s novel about the privileged babyboomer generation, who “had it so good”, got me thinking again about the strikingly different 60s experience of one of Britain’s best known presenters — Baroness Floella Benjamin. Her frank autobiography, The Arms of Britannia, about her teenage years is a harrowing account of daily racist abuse, an aspect of Swinging London that embarrasses us, and has not been widely explored.  I thought it worth posting the long version of my exclusive interview, which appeared in The Independent in October (just after the row over ending universal Child Benefit), and examines her journey to the House of Lords. The Age of Aquarius musical, Hair, did actually change her life, though not in the way you might think…

Baroness Floella Benjamin

Baroness Floella Benjamin

There is something strange about meeting the LibDem Peer who probably raised a significant number of the New Generation of MPs running Britain’s major political parties as toddlers. A kind of journey from Big Ted to the Big Society.

As I wait in the  vaulted  Victorian splendour of the National Liberal Club I find myself imagining pre-school  Master Nick, Master David and young Master Ed in front of the glowing  TV screen in the  early 70s being read to or watching Humpty and Little Ted have a tea party with Jemima the ragdoll. I suspect all but Ed may have been too old to have benefitted from Benjamin’s songs about “Reggae Rita” on Playschool.

And when the Baroness arrives — she combines an elegant black  trouser suit and white costume jewellery  with a delightfully streetsmart spikey top knot ponytail. Impossible to imagine any other 61 year old, let along a member of the House of Lords could ever get away with. She’s enjoying the Lords. Unlike elsewhere no one’s yet asked her “what are you doing here?” She also looks at least 15 years younger. Or is that the spell of meeting the lady who spoke to me through the TV all those years ago…

Baroness Benjamin of Beckenham rolls delightfully in the air when you say it;  as if it had been chosen for the alliterative possibilities of reading it out loud to children. The reality is rather darker. She chose to take her title from the South East London suburb, in tribute to her parents, whose decision to move their 6 children to a neighbourhood with good schools and a better class of jumble sales to clothe them,  saw them endure years of racist abuse from neighbours who pushed dog excrement through their letterbox and shouted at them in the street. The day Mrs Benjamin arrived with the children to view the house they’d just bought, neighbours called police to report a criminal gang were breaking in.

Floella Benjamin’s new autobiography about her teenage years, “The Arms of Britannia”,  while written for young readers and with schools in mind,  is a distressing read, though undoubtedly therapeutic to write; a thoughtprovoking counterbalance to the Swinging 60s memoirs of many celebrity Londoners. While David Bowie was down the road in Bromley commuting into Carnaby Street as a longhaired pop dandy, and Peter Cook was opening up The Establishment Club in Soho for the political classes to come and watch themselves being mocked, Floella Benjamin growing up near Crystal Palace, says she spent every single day like a soldier on patrol or guard duty, ready for for passers by to hurl racist abuse at her. She remembers her handsome brother Lester being regularly beaten up; seeing him lying on the ground his white shirt covered in blood.  “When I came here I realised I wasn’t a person anymore. I was a colour..I didn’t admit to anyone how much I enjoyed hurting people because of how much they had hurt me. I felt the force of being pushed to the limit.”

“For the first four years of being in England,” she says, sitting on a leather sofa in the genteel surroundings of the club’s library, “I fought almost every day. You never know who would spit at you, or try  to pee on you, or lift your skirt and say “Where’s your tail, monkey?””.

Born in Trinidad, the Baronness had endured the trauma of nearly 2 years of sometimes neglectful separation with a foster family, before her parents, she called Dardie and Marmie, were able to bring her to join them in London in 1964 at the age of 10. It is a trauma she says for a generation of West Indian children left  behind that she’d like to document more widely.  That early childhood was the focus of her earlier memoir “Coming to England”, which she wrote, she says, like her latest book, “because there was nothing that reflected my experience” . It also she says, helps people understand the anger of so many young black men even today, who are defensive about the daily fear of racist treatment they endure.

The turning point in her life she, says, came in 1964 at 14, when she nearly killed a boy  who was shouting racist names at her, as she walked to the shops in Penge High Street. She grabbed his lollipop and jamming it down his throat, watching him turn blue. Benjamin calls it her “spiritual moment”; the moment when she says she realised that violence was not the answer. She pulled out the lollipop and walked off proud.

And the Benjamin family — high achievers all– made the classic immigrant journey so often held up by politicians of all persuasions. Working hard at school, gaining qualifiications and entering the professions. Floella’s mother used to clean office buildings, and died just 2 years before her daughter was elevated to the House of Lords with a Life Peerage. 16 year old Floella crossed the threshold of Barclays  head office as a clerk, with the ambition of becoming Britain’s first female bank manager. She claims she pioneered women wearing trouser suits in the City. In the light of the credit crunch, one likes to imagine what she night have achieved if she’d pursued it.

But it was Benjamin’s superficially impulsive career change to showbusiness that made her political journey possible, and reveals the performer within the practically minded bankclerk, set to progress steadily up through the ranks of charities, government advisory bodies and media industry networking clubs to the highest echelons of the political Establishment. Used to singing on stage with her clerk and part time jazz musician father’s band, and organising dance nights  for the West Indian Student Centre in London’s Earl’s Court, she responded to an advert in a newspaper in 1973 seeking non-professionals for a new musical tour.  The show was “Hair”, famously controversial for its hippie onstage nudity. Going in her lunchbreak from the bank, you know all you need to know about  Benjamin’s steely determination from the fact that she not only got cast, but  also rather presumptuously announced at the audition  that she wouldn’t be taking her clothes off.

“Is that really true?” I ask cynically.

“Yes. Myself, and Paul Nicholas, “she returns without even a blink.

After a few roles in TV (including a jailed prostitute in “Within These Walls”, the mixed race sitcom “Mixed Blessing”  and the film “Black Joy”, described on the BFI website as a kind of Brixton-set “blaxploitation effort), Benjamin got the role that put her at the heart of  British culture. In 1976, she took off her Hair afro stage wig to reveal her own blue beaded braids, and joined  the much loved and admired preschool children’s TV show Playschool — which inspired America’s Sesame Street — and later, Playaway, staying to the end of its run in 1984 — a closure she  fought fiercely and publicly. On Radio 4 recent “The Reunion” she was among the presenters reminiscing about the creative freedom they were given, without commercial pressure.  She remains a vocal campaigner for British made quality children’s drama and entertainment as a bulwark against the sexualised materialism of, what the papers have dubbed “toxic childhood” culture, and a passionate defender of the BBC’s record in children’s programming.

In 1977,  at the height of her Playschool fame, long before children’s TV presenters stripping off for lads mags became a well trodden career path, Playboy offered her a large sum to pose nude. “They offered me so much money,” she reveals. ” A fortune.” She smiles, knowingly. “You can just imagine how they’d have loved it, if I’d laid there with my blue beads on. But how long would it have lasted? And then what? The impact on my career?  I had to say no. I’ve never done anything I that I didn’t believe in. I tell young women never compromise your beauty”.

Perhaps most tellingly, Benjamin says she told Playboy,  “I’ll make the same money, but over the long term.” Far too careful to name names, Benjamin sits forward on the armchair and reflects on the work she’s lost over the years through turning down the casting couch. Acting jobs, even as a producer. Tellingly, while 70s theatrical London was probably still swinging, Benjamin had no truck with what she rather quaintly in her book, terms “hankypanky”. Instead she’d settled down with her husband, Keith Taylor —  who she’d met  when he was stage manager on Hair, had two children, and remains with him, as her manager, more than 40 years on. Despite the frankness of her books, she has always been fiercely protective of her personal privacy.

But after the end of Playschool in 1984 she was quietly but determinedly building influence in public life; much of it voluntary, earning an OBE, and a BAFTA award for services to broadcasting and children’s television.  As  well as continuing to make children’s programmes through her own production company, she was working for  charities such as  NSPCC, and Barnardos, but also quangos and advisory boards; everything from the Millennium Commission that helped decide what to put in the ill-fated Dome, to the Royal Mail’s stamp advisory committee, where she pointed out that prospective designs for Christmas stamps had no black children at all.

“Everybody buys stamps,” she states. And then puts on a sad expression immediately recognisable from how she addressed children directly reading stories through the camera on Playschool.  “I said, ‘I’m heartbroken. Because you’re saying all black people are not part of Christmas.’ The people on the board went, ‘Oh, we hadn’t realised.’ I’m there to make people notice.”

This approach clearly has been getting results wherever Benjamin has been on a board or an advisory panel. On BAFTA juries,  on the Women of the Year awards,  on children’s bookprize panels. Shirley Hughes is, says Benjamin, among the children’s writers and illustrators who’ve thanked her for “opening her eyes” to the importance of reflecting cultural diversity in their pictures. “One writer wanted me to do the introduction for their book, and when I pointed out every single character in the illustrations was white they said “Oh, but  it’s a fantasy world.” Floella smiles through closed lips. She’s made it her mission to tackle this sort of casual ignorance, because she says, it matters. It is all about making all Britons, know they belong.

It is why belonging to the establishment matters to her.

In her maiden speech to the Lords earlier this month, Baroness Benjamin acknowledged that her entire career had been about Getting There: From arguing with a casting director who insisted it wasn’t “realistic” to cast a black woman as anything other than a bus conductor or a thief, to wearing the ermine.  “I love being part of this establishment,” she said on October 5th, acknowledging how much Britain had changed in her lifetime.

Benjamin has no truck with those who decline Honours, when I cite the argument made by people like the poet, Benjamin Zephaniah about their oppressive association with Empire.

“The honour is to recognise the contribution YOU have made to this society that you are a part of, ” she says firmly and seriously. “That’s what people like myself are fighting for. Whether for being a JP, a lollipop lady or in showbusiness… When you get an honour, your peers write about you and why you deserve it. You have to download the form and read the requirements and then submit it. I’m often nominating people through the system. That’s the system. You have to know the rules to break them. Maybe you could change what you call it, if you don’t like the word “empire” on the OBE. But it gives you (she holds her head up and articulates the word knowingly) “BOTTOM”. It’s what her headmistress used to say. “It’s important to have bottom. Then people listen to you.”

So is the coalition listening? Asked repeatedly to run as an MP over the years, Benjamin   says she found a natural home for her child-centred philosophy with the Liberal Democrats;  going down a storm at party conferences.  What does she make of the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg?

“What you see is what you get with Nick,” she asserts. “When we met he asked me “If you were in government, what would you want?” I said to promote children. He shook my hand said that he agreed. He said if you get it right with the children at the beginning you have sorted it out for life.”

Now for the second time, the party’s asked her to consider standing for London Mayor. “They said ‘You are everything that represents the party.'” But perhaps having watched the mauling former deputy assistant Metropolitan Police Commissioner Brian Paddick took at the last Mayoral election between Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone, Benjamin is not biting; for now: “My mum said ‘don’t touch it’..I wouldn’t have been given space between the battling egos in place at the time.” This is quite an admission from the woman who tells me she once gave the notoriously difficult theatrical co-star  Kenneth Williams a telling off  for rudeness and got him to apologise. “He was never rude again.”

Running for Mayor this time, though? It’s clearly not going to happen. “I can see the headlines, ” she says, matter of factly. “Which window has she come through today?” What’s the point? My ideas on important issues – on families, on tackling gangs and knife crime would have been overlooked. I’d be between two battling peacocks. ” But as for the next? Well, Benjamin is just starting out  in politics and like with everything else, she’s in it for the long term. “We’ll see. I’m going to keep working till I die…It’s up to people like Diane [Abbott], Oona [King] and myself to just say, we’re laying the path for you.”

“I want to be judged on my actions in a political place. It’s important that my maiden speech was reported on Today In Parliament on Radio 4 with that audience. People don’t yet know or understand me. They think I’m just ambitious, or a silly children’s presenter So I have to prove myself.”

Proving herself as a politician will be challenging, as the Coalition announces deeply controversial deficit reducing policies. Benjamin admits she’s been bruised by  the grillings she’s got in early interviews since her peerage, about the LibDems signing up to the Coalition. It’s not how she’s used to doing business.  “Life is a compromise,” she tells me. “I’m not happy with it, but I’m realistic.” She has the sharpness to keep her counsel for now, on the very issues where you might expect a strong opinion. What does the champion of children’s rights and fairnesss make of the planned slashing of Child Benefit?

I can see Benjamin closing up tight. “We haven’t discussed it yet. I don’t know enough about what’s really going to happen.” But what does she think of the idea that the Coalition government is suggesting it’s fair to take the benefit away from sole breadwinner families on less than 44 thousand pounds, but not from two-earner families on 80 thousand?

She looks at me very firmly and will not be drawn. “The process has not been thought through yet, ” she insists. “We want fairness, even though it might be difficult. We need a moral conscience. we are in it together, But we will have to re think some things Like the free bus pass.”

It’s not that there are two Floella Benjamins. Quite the contrary. The one Benjamin operates on two levels. The charming, disarming Floella who can quiet  a crying toddler in its pushchair in the supermarket queue  and get a gruff young man to apologetically take take his “size 11s” off the seat on the bus by smiling and saying how “You’ve ruined my day. Here I am in my nice white suit and I can’t sit down now, can I?” and the practical, form filling Baroness Benjamin who worked hard at school and in the bank, and on stage, and  developed a protective carapace from all those years of racist name calling and abuse;  determined to beat the bullies and be judged on her ability and to make it easier for others  coming up behind her

She does have a remarkable skill to draw you in. “You have to tell a story,” she explains, to engage a child. She knows she has a gift for it . And most remarkably of all, for a politician, the ability to bring out the moral conscience in people.

“Winos do it, ” Benjamin tells me. “They see me walking  and they say I’m so sorry, Floella. I’ve let you down”.

Why?

“Because when they were children I told them everything was possible. Society let them down.” It’s quite an effect to have on grown men.

Her formative experiences are so profoundly different to those of the public  school educated and Prime Minister and Deputy PM. David Cameron once even felt the need in the pre-election leaders’ debates to specify that he had spoken to a black man, about immigration. But with the first PMQs having more than ever before, the air of a school debating society, I can’t resist suggesting naughtily: “Have you ever thought about looking the Prime Minister in the eye and talking to him in that Playschool voice?” Appealing  to, in the words of Kate Bush, the man with the child in their his eyes. “Now David, I am very disappointed in you and what you’re thinking about doing to Child Benefit.”

Her eyes are sparkling and she smiles carefully back; amused at the idea, but gives me no encouragement. “I have to not be judgmental. I won’t believe what I see on screen. I’ll wait to meet him.”

So Floella Benjamin is very much at the heart of the establishment now. But the title of her book “The Arms of Britannia” seems to refer as much to weaponry as to the embrace of her home country.

In the two most shocking incidents, Benjamin recalls how she managed to get away from a car mechanic who had trapped her in his garage intending to rape her. Benjamin recounts how she  drew herself up and imitated the haughty voice of her English teacher, Mrs Thomas, who had once humiliated her for talking with a broad Trinidadian accent.  Instead of panicking she announced, “My good man, if you so much as lay a finger on me, my 3 6 ft brothers will come round and teach you a lesson you will never forget. Now pull yourself together”.

In the other incident, she was beaten up at the age of 19 in a bowling alley by a gang of boys who smashed her face in shouting “you fucking nigger” while the bouncers looked on and did nothing. Benjamin even managed to find her tooth and stick it back in place, the nerve stitching itself back, before escaping. “My smile is my weapon,” she tells me. And though she is still on “guard duty” today, she is optimistic.  “The amount of people who come to me and apologise,” she says,  after they hear about her experiences . “I met the neighbour from hell who had put dog mess through my letter box, who came to ask for forgiveness.” Benjamin says a lot of apologies in letter and in person come from strangers. “Especially those now in their 70s. They were like those bouncers who just stood by.”

It is time to go home. Out of the club room,  past the cut-glass accented white men in blazers, down the spiral staircase, out the big arched doorway.

At the front entrance a thirtysomething man in a suit emerges from a meeting and I can see it happening.. I can see the child in his eyes. He hovers, fidgeting a bit while Floella says good bye to me, and then apologizes to her profusely, for stopping her, embarrassed and excited and grinning endearingly. He is one of her Playschool children. Baroness Benjamin smiles that beautiful smile and heads off to her next engagement.

As she might have said, to us all, in the middle of reading out a story, “I wonder what she’ll do next?”

Link to original article: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/floella-benjamin-from-big-ted-to-the-big-society-2114941.html

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When I Lived In Groovy Times – an interview with the Novelist Linda Grant

Posted on January 11, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

I spent a fascinating afternoon with award winning British writer, Linda Grant, this week, discussing her timely new novel, We Had It So Good, (published January 20th 2010) about the babyboomer generation and going through photos she’d dug out for my news cameras, to help analyse how she looked back on the Age of Aquarius. You can see how we used them and that song from Hair in my Channel 4 News report today here, and the story of the people in the photos, below.

So how did the generation of peace and love, who were going to change the world, end up accused of screwing the young of today? Tony Blair and Bill Clinton (Oxford boomers, of course) appear at distance — in the lives of 4 students who meet at Oxford in the 60s and rise effortlessly in London’s media elite, to affluence. The failure of the West to avert genocide in Bosnia, and 9/11, expose their generation’s failures, and the credit crunch is looming….

While there’s been no shortage of scathing political and economic analyses of the babyboomer role in creating a Jilted Generation , including Conservative minister David Willets in  The Pinch and What Did The Babyboomers Ever Do For Us? , Grant revealed a more subtle, philosophical perspective on her much maligned generation.

Only after the 9/11 attacks she says, did she realise how lucky her generation had been.  As we looked at her — a babe in the arms of her parents posing in their oh-so middle aged smart suits in front of their car  in Liverpool suburbia — she articulates the point that all the great legislative liberations ascribed to the 60s, are the legacy of that 30s generation who fought fascism: Legalised abortion, decriminalised homosexuality, equal pay and race equality law. That recognition is still rare.

Photos with her fantastically handsome draftdodging boyfriend in Canada in the early 70s show an equally stunning, freshfaced Grant with Bowie style face paint. There is Grant in a khaki boiler suit on a pro-choice rally with fellow feminist activists. While the interview is not about clothes, the author of The Thoughtful Dresser does of course, reveal so much about identity through what people wear. And she makes the times come alive, outside the newsreel cultural memories of those too young to be there. Among the fascinating things we talked about that didn’t make the final cut of the interview, her memory of the reek of patchouli oil everywhere, and the DIY fashion for inserting brightly patterned swatches of fabric into the seams of jeans to create your own flares.

The most fascinating photo you see in the report is the dinner party — not dissimilar to the Islington dinner parties of her fictional friends. She picks then all out: the draft dodger (another one), the feminist, the one who became a Labour MP.

And when I asked, looking at that beautiful black and white image of a wistful and ethereal teenage Linda, taken by a boyfriend, about what a 19 year old today would get out of reading the novel, Grant quite rightly lays her generation’s claim to have brought on the achievements of feminism. The drug culture, for better or worse, is there too, and most thoughtfully of all, she suggests an unexpected “toxic legacy” in the obsession with youth, of some of her generation, that has normalised the self mutilation of plastic surgery and botox.

Longer version of the interview here:

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Little Feminist on the Prairie

Posted on January 10, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

Laura lived through the 1893 and 1929 banking panics

This is the full version of my Guardian article published in November 2010, about why I chose her as my specialist subject on Celebrity Mastermind.

What Laura Ingalls Wilder still  teaches us about independence, and living through an age of austerity.

‘Before noon  Pa said, “Whoa!” The wagon stopped. “Here we are Caroline. Right here we’ll build our house.” Laura and Mary scrambled over the feedbox and dropped to the ground in a hurry. All around there  was  nothing but grassy prairie spreading to the edge of the sky.”’ (Little House on the Prairie. Chapter 5)

A long time ago, when this journalist was a little girl in 70s London suburbia, the fairy tale prose of Little House on the Prairie with a heroine with identical dark plaits, captured my imagination and fuelled a life long fascination with the American Wild West. Me and my friend Reena played it for hours in the tall trees at the end of her garden; each of us taking multiple parts. To be honest it was the longrunning TV series that I knew,  with its blonde “prairie bitch” Nellie Oleson, the rich storekeeper’s daughter, bullying the good hearted Laura Ingalls and her country family episode after episode. A kind of Louisa May Alcott with cat fights. “Desperate Little Women”; really.

And then 2 years ago the Credit Crunch and a milestone birthday made me seek out the 9 out of print Puffins with their famous Garth Williams illustrations on Ebay and I finally read them.

At first I found what I’d expected; happy tales of simple childhood pleasures based on family bonds and the seasons: A corncob for a doll. Sugaring parties after the maple syrup had been gathered in. A house and life made entirely by their own hands – Pa even made his own bullets. Only the nails were “boughten”. Cowboys singing under the stars. There was a Credit Crunch vogue across the Atlantic for Manhattanites to rediscover the Little House books with their own  apartment dwelling daughters. Appropriately, enough the first, “Little House in the Big Woods” had been a great success in 1932, and was marketed as ‘the book the Depression couldn’t stop’.  But for me there was more than a modish fascination with pre-tech poverty.

“In the seventh year a mysterious catastrophe was worldwide. All banks failed. From coast to coast the factories shut down, and business ceased. This was a Panic.” (Epilogue to The First Four Years)

Here was a woman who recognised  “that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history.” Born in 1867 just 2 years after the end of the Civil War, Laura Ingalls was a pioneer girl, whose family moved west to farm the “unpopulated“ Western Prairies. She lived through the coming of the Railroad, the mass eviction of the Osage Indian tribe (documented in “Little House on the Prairie”) to the rise of Elvis Presley. She died at 90 just 7 months before the launch of Sputnik  in the Missouri farmhouse she’d bought with her husband in 1894.  Having slowly built up  prosperity after the great 1893 Panic and banking collapse, the couple saw their life savings wiped out in the 1929 Wall Street Crash.

In her 9 novels—progressively darker and more ambivalent in I found a woman with a robust hatred of debt and credit, and a deep suspicion that only the government and the rich financiers back East made any money out of the great Land Rush dream. Laura married in her black cashmere dress to save the trouble and expense of an elaborate wedding. She refused to say “I obey” in her marriage vows, one can only assume, having seen the disaster brought on her own family by her father’s disastrous decisions to raise 4 daughters in a landscape that demanded such hard labour of its sons. The same reason, she told Almanzo that she wanted to give up farming. But she agreed to see if they could make a go of it in 4 years. Published posthumously in 1971, The First Four Years documents heartrending hardship. Burdened from the start by a massive mortgage, drought, hailstorms  and fires destroy their very farmhouse. Almanzo is crippled at 31 by diphtheria. And the book tells of the secret sorrows of women. In one incident Laura recounts her horror as their desperate childless neighbours the Boasts offer her their best horse in return for her baby daughter, Rose. Laura  herself  lost her only son in infancy.

While she often writes of her desire to be free like the Indians, riding bareback, her “Little House on the Prairie” is built illegally on occupied Osage Indian land and the family live in fear of a massacre. Her father’s bad judgement forces him to abandon it before they are evicted by Federal troops. He buys a Minnesota farm , apparently oblivious to the regular plagues of grasshoppers that, combined with prairie fires and duststorms drive the Ingalls into crushing debt. Her fiancé Almanzo comes back from a trip with tales of Iowa farmers burning their corn, unable to sell it for even 25 cents a bushel.  Wilder’s grandfather had once abandoned a property unable to keep up his mortgage payments. In her own life, though never mentioned in the novels, Pa Ingalls fled unpaid debts, after an illfated venture into the hotel trade in Iowa.

“It’s a queer country out here. Strange things happen.” Pa in These Happy Golden Years

Wilder, who was by her 50s an experienced farming journalist, brought an artist’s eye to the remarkable events she’d witnessed. In 1939 when the cyclone-fuelled fantasy of “The Wizard of Oz” appeared in cinemas – Laura had written 5 novels set in the same sinister landscape; but entirely real. In These Happy Golden Years (1943) Wilder recounts how a cyclone whisks away an entire farmhouse, but the front door comes gently back down from a cloudless sky to the exact spot, with every hinge intact. Two boys on a wagon are caught up in the same storm. One survives to describe his remarkable experience inside the twister — his 7 year old brother is found the next day later with every bone in his body broken. An Indian comes to town one day to warn of The Long Winter(1940).  I have rarely read as unsettling a book as her account of the family enduring 7 months of near starvation in the blizzards of 1880 to 81.  No Hollywood studio ever bought the rights to the books in her lifetime; mainly, it seemed because of the impossibility of staging some of the incredible events of her life – notably the “glittering cloud” of grasshoppers that descends on their Minnesota wheat crop in “On the Banks of Plum Creek” and devours a year’s labour in hours.

And Wilder pioneered new literary terrain, including the very first Young Adult fiction in the later novels  – including Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years – which document Laura’s teenage anxieties and romance with touchingly modern woes. Memorably she describes her self-loathing for the “short round girl”,  she sees in the mirror, when she longs to be like slender, willowy blonde Nellie Oleson (who really does try to steal her boyfriend).  She had to push her publishers hard for the books to be branded and marketed as a series; when they were, they proved a great model for future book marketing. Brought up to be a sentimental Victorian on Walter Scott novels and Tennyson’s poetry, Wilder turned out to be as sharp and no-nonsense a businesswoman in her own way, as the feisty Hollywood characters being played on screen in the 30s by the likes of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.

30 years after the last “Little House” novel appeared, she has a special status in American culture. The various sites where her family lived in Wisconsin, Kansas, Dakota and Missouri are now much visited museums. There is an industry of books and merchandise churned out by her daughter’s heirs. The trio of child stars have recently published their own Gen X memoirs of growing up on the “Little House” TV series – notably Alison “Nasty Nellie” Arngrim’s delightfully titled  Confessions of a Prairie Bitch.  There is a musical. I’m sure Wilder, who once ran for political office and ran a local bureau administering farm loans, would have loved the fact that the TV “Laura” Melissa Gilbert, grew up to head the powerful Screen Actors’ Guild. Walnut Grove near her Plum Creek home, in Minnesota even hosts a biannual “Laurapalooza” celebration.

But the Osage nation, according to biographer Pamela Smith Hill, still condemns her works. In her own life time Wilder apologised for her thoughtlessness and amended a line in “Little House on the Prairie” that said Kansas had “no people, only Indians.” It now reads “no settlers, only Indians”.  Another book features her father blacking up for a minstrel turn at a town social. I suspect the accompanying Garth Williams illustration at least may have been discreetly dropped.

But it seems to me impossible to read the books, without appreciating the integrity of what they tried to convey. One woman’s view of a remarkable and sometimes cruel century. One day I know I will take my own family on a pilgrimage to Rocky Ridge Farm, built entirely out of local materials, with its teeny kitchen hand-made to suit her 4’11” frame. Her books, like the Thanksgiving holiday, are a celebration of endurance and survival in the face of disaster – natural and manmade. As Wilder  wrote of her family in their Little House in the Big Woods: “They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.”

Link to original Guardian article First published November 26th 2010

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Mastermind: Lessons from the black leather chair

Posted on January 9, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

When I agreed to appear on BBC1’s Celebrity Mastermind at Christmas, nobody told me I would be subject to makeup mishaps, psychological intimidation and pain in the brain.

Relief after winning by 1 point

I know, I know. The word “celebrity” in a programme title is surely a no-go for a serious journalist. But it was Mastermind. Who didn’t grow up watching Magnus Magnusson, that sombre music, and shouting  answers at the telly? I was an academic girl. And unlike my experience of the adult world of work, exams seemed fairer;  judging you on actual performance and ability.

As I forced my own children to study hard for exams, here was a chance to show them I was still prepared to revise.  And here’s what I can tell you in case you ever go on.

My first choice specialist subject (classic TV serial Star Trek) was verboten. Apparently someone had done star Trek movies last year. My husband suggested the novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder, as I’d been raving about them since buying them up on eBay a year or so earlier. You can find out why by reading my Guardian article about her from November 2010.  A quick phone conversation and email exchange  back in August with the producers agreed the parameters of revision – nine novels (the last published posthumously) and a biography to include her life as well.

And that was pretty much it. I read the novels and biography making a book of notes. In the green room after the recording, decathlete Dean Macey admitted to doing exactly the same, except while watching the Back to the Future movies.

‘Revise your specialist subject’
As the recording date approached I used my journalistic instincts to research other areas. An ITN makeup artist told me one day that ITV News’ Alastair Stewart had won his Celebrity Mastermind last year, so I contacted him for what turned out to be the most important advice. “Oh, you’re a journalist,” he said reassuringly. “You don’t need to worry about general knowledge. Just make sure you’ve revised your specialist subject.”

Of course that wasn’t enough for me. As  M-day approached I approached friends on Twitter to help me strengthen my weak areas. The editor of New Scientist, @RogerHighfield, came up with a list of key scientific developments of the past decade; my father-in-law, Glen Millar, produced a fact sheet of sporting trivia, including FA cup winners going back to the 1970s and the names of every British cricket ground. Sadly it turned out he’d have been better off including a definition of “wicket”. On the day of the recording my sister, Saira MacNicol, tested me on the periodic table over the phone.

None of these came up. I was deeply jealous when Dr Pixie McKenna got a question on converting 32F to Celsius.

Psychological warfare
And then, with just four days to go, there was the psychological warfare. Robert Webb and Giles Coren declared in their newspaper columns, and then  via Twitter, that they’d done no preparation. Ah, the old boy versus swotty girl mind trick. I tweeted back that  I had laminated note cards – which was a lie (though perhaps marking my notebook with highlighter pens is no less Hermione).

An old university contemporary, Richard Herring, had already recorded his show and told me about his friendly banter with John Humphrys about his Hitler moustache. Well, I wasn’t going to be able to compete on that.

Two days before the recording I finally tried out the Mastermind website where you can play a multiple choice version of the game. It was impressively highbrow with plenty of questions about medieval art and politics, and proved very addictive. But I was wary of taking comfort in my scores, given even a blind guess had a 20% chance of being correct.

Channel 4 News presenter Samira Ahmed in the green room of Celebrity Mastermind

Makeup mishap
On the day of the recording I did have the largest entourage in the audience as loads of friends and family  came down from as far as Cheshire to watch. In fact they make up most of the front row visible behind the contestants. The children got permission to take the day off school, but in return I had the burden of all the teachers very keen to know how I did. Who was the school child again?

I wore my comfiest trainers, wary of negotiating the walk of terror to the chair. In the makeup room a last-minute mishap could have thrown me. A lipstick brush broke as the makeup artist  was giving me a final touch up and I stared in horror at the big glob of lippy down the front of my lucky 70s Nasa T-shirt.

The warm-up comic had to keep filling while the makeup team dabbed me with dry cleaning fluid, water and then aimed a hairdryer at my chest. The other contestants had to stand around watching. You can see me clutching my jacket defensively each time I sit down in the chair.

The producers had given us some rules. No interrupting the question. They’d timed the two minutes so that in theory we would all get asked the same number of questions. Passes count against you in a tie, but passing would save time for more questions, than answering incorrectly. That’s what I went for.

Pain in the brain
They’d also told me that when the lights go down, it can be quite calming. In fact halfway through the second round I had actually turned off my ears and missed key words of several questions. The question about a pop star divorce needed repetition as I’d not heard the words “Paul McCartney”. I also missed the word “shadow” in the Chancellor question about needing to buy a book on economics. I’d like to think my answer of George Osborne might be interpreted as witty satire rather than political bias.

On close-up I could see the pain in my brain when I knew I knew the answer but it wouldn’t come (hence Macao rather than Manila as my response to the capital of the Philippines.) It’s like the engine is spinning, but the gears won’t engage. I promise I won’t shout at the telly at others anymore.

Many friends and viewers have since commented about whether I was distracted by John’s psychedelic purple tie and shirt combo. I have, of course, had years of experience of dealing with wacky ties in the studio. And at least I didn’t have to look at his socks.

In the end it came down to luck and maybe a bit of nerve. It’s been interesting finding out  who’d been asked to take part before, but was too scared to go on. I hadn’t expected to win, but it’s a relief I did. The trophy sits on top of my piano next to my Stonewall award for broadcast of the year. I won it a year ago for a report on the horrific so-called “corrective” rape of lesbian women in South Africa, because Action Aid approached me about their campaign to tackle homophobic crime. I was proud to choose Action Aid and the Fawcett Society as my charities on Mastermind because of the great work both do to promote female equality at home and abroad.

I am a little sad that I’ve lost the Newsround Newshound badge John Craven sent me when I was nine. But the Mastermind one is too big to lose. And I can at least hold my head up high in the office and at the school gate when term starts again.

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Where next for the government’s ad men?

Posted on January 9, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

In the light of the flu crisis this winter, here’s my special Channel 4 News report from June 28th 2010 which predicted the dangers as well as the budgetary challenges, as the new government slashed spending on public information campaigns.

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Putting a value on the cost of Bookgifting

Posted on January 9, 2011 by Samira Ahmed

Government backtracks on funding for Book Trust

Monday 27 December 2010
As the Book Trust charity confirms the government will now help the book gifting programme continue in England, Samira Ahmed reflects on how to put a cost on the value of the scheme.

In the row that blew up over the government’s 100 per cent cull of book gifting in England through the Book Trust charity, and then its apparent u-turn yesterday after an outcry by writers, I was struck by how the programme epitomises the difficulty in measuring value rather than cost.

Writers have a vested interest, you could argue cynically, in fighting for children to be turned into book consumers.

Giving free books to affluent families seems an obvious indulgence in an age of austerity. In chapter five of the bestselling Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner’s behavioural economics analysis on “What makes the perfect parent?” found that having many books in the home was a more relevant factor to predict a future success, than whether the child’s parents read to him nearly every day.

(Their point was that social background was more important, than literally how many times you were read to or taken to museums.)

But then how many of the politicians, bloggers and journalists pontificating about the Book gifting programme have directly experienced it with their baby? This journalist, for one.

I can still remember that moment in the basement baby clinic in 1999 when the health visitor handed over the hardboard book about bears needing hugs, in the thick cloth supermarket sponsored bag. She had a pained look and a weary smile as she warned me of the strangling hazard posed by the bag’s long handles.

As an English graduate I had a pained look about the twee subject matter and illustrations. Parents with no English, young teenage parents with no earnings, we all sat together in the same room with our squealing babies. We all got the same book.

The gesture was hugely significant. (and the book turned out to be good after all). Like child benefit the universal nature of the book gifting programme is its most important statement. I am looking at my first letter from the DSS in October 1999 as I write this, and I remember how I felt.

An educated, middleclass woman, at home without social status or income for the first time, my body transformed by childbirth, breastfeeding and sleep deprivation; here was the government sending a recognition that raising children mattered to society.

£14.40 a week went into my bank account, not my husband’s.  The book came to my son along with his immunisations; an investment in his future.

There is an argument for means testing child benefit, though it is one the government has failed to fully explore. But it is not quite the same for book gifting. Giving every parent a copy of the same book for their child was an official statement about the universal social value of family time; not just literacy. (How do you put a monetary value on storytelling at bedtime?)

To hand out copies in the baby clinic only to the parents on benefits, would have immediately created a stigma; that some were deemed failures or problems. They might reasonably view it as patronising.

Eleven years on, I still have the bag (to shop with in my lunch hour) and the book.

My son has avoided any accidents with the bag handles, and is a fan of Artemis Fowl and Alex Rider. His nine year old sister did not get a free book, but she is into Laura Ingalls Wilder like her mother. I still read to them when I can. A top tip is to keep reading after they can do it for themselves, but to read other stuff, they would not manage yet. (In our house that is currently a combination of the Old Testament and Private Eye).

While there is much sanctimonious talk from opponents of the coalition about the government supposedly knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing, Michael Gove’s “A Christmas Carol”-like change of heart on Boxing Day morning,  on funding for the Book Trust’s Book gifting programme in England, suggests there is recognition of those issues. But there will be more challenges like this ahead.

They require from David Cameron and his government a more instinctive sense of civic values, and the input of the people who know what they are for, currently all too often missing from discussions about the Big Society – senior citizens, people with disabilities, women and young people.

(This article first appeared on the Channel 4 News website)

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